From Jim Crow to Civil Rights
Subtitle: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2004
Language: eng
Number of pages: 688
ISBN-13: 9780195129038
First sentence: In 1890, the Louisiana legislature, following a trend initiated in Florida a few years earlier, passed a law requiring railroads to provide "equal but separate" accommodations for black passengers.
Description: Publisher's description: Do Supreme Court decisions matter? In this book, Michale J. Klarman examines the social and political impact of the Supreme Court's decisions involving race relations from Plessy, the Progressive Era, and the Interwar period to World Wars I and II, Brown and the Civil Rights Movement. He explores the wide variety of consequences that Brown may have had - raising the salience of race issues, educating opinion, mobilising supporters, energising opponents of racial change. He concludes that Brown was ultimately more important for mobilising southern white opposition to radical change than for encouraging direct-action protest.